Chapter Nineteen
My head’s too heavy. I can’t raise it from my knees. I wish I could erase my mind, forget my whole life.
I’ve failed Dad. I’ve failed myself.
We’re going to die.
“Congratulations, Ms. Delgado,” Dr. Langmore says. “Your brother will be proud.”
“I’m sure,” Mirabel says.
Fingers brush my shoulder. “Norah?” Bree asks. “Are you okay?”
Her timid voice scorches me with rage, melting the lead that weighs down my body. I shake her off and stumble for the nearest door.
Outside, a cold breeze sighs along the Academy’s stone hulks, chilling the sweat on my skin.
Students walk across the quad in light sweaters and ornamental scarves under a turquoise sky.
They chatter and laugh, their weekends just starting.
They look like time travelers from the distant past, before everything changed.
Or from the future, when no one at the Academy will remember a girl named Norah Sullivan went here, let alone what happened to her.
I’m about to bolt toward the forest and silence when someone grabs my wounded arm below the bite. I hiss and spin.
It’s Bree, face pink and trembly. “I know how much you wanted to win.”
More rage, impossibly hot. I’m shivering, but I feel as if my skin may combust, crackling like it did in flickerstate. She knows how much I wanted to win? She has no idea.
(You didn’t tell her, a voice in my head whispers. I ignore it.)
If I look at her wet blue eyes any longer, I’ll scratch them out. I stare over her shoulder. Candace exits the nav building, pauses between the two lions guarding the door, and walks toward us with a frown. She stops behind Bree, protectively close.
Vik, Griffin, and Mirabel come through the same door.
They don’t look like winners. Vik’s face is a dead vacancy.
Griffin has folded his arms tightly across his stomach.
There’s a hard glaze to Mirabel’s stare, like she’ll snap at the next person who dares congratulate her.
The three of them exchange confused looks when they see me and Bree faced off.
Bree seems to take heart from our audience. “We did really well though,” she says loudly. “No one expected senior transfers to get to the finals.”
“True,” Mirabel murmurs.
Candace turns and glares, more furious than I’ve ever seen her.
Mirabel blanches. “I didn’t mean—sorry.”
“We’re guaranteed A’s.” Bree smiles at me, pressuring me to smile back. “We can coast through the rest of the semester.”
I know what she wants: for me to calm down, stop visibly freaking out, and agree that yes, we did pretty well, and isn’t that great. But if I open my mouth right now, agreement won’t come out. Grief and rage and panic will. I shake my head and turn away.
Bree steps after me. “Norah, wait.”
“I need to be alone,” I choke out. “Please.”
“Tell me you’re okay.” Her voice rises anxiously.
She doesn’t care whether I’m okay. She cares whether I’m okay with her. I step back. “I need—”
“Wait—” She grabs my arm again, directly over the bite this time.
“You really are weak,” I snap, wrenching from her grip. “Did you even try to win your duel?”
Her wet eyes widen and spill over.
Candace glares, her expression telling me, clear as day, that I’ve crossed a line. Griffin stares at me too, face shifting from confused to understanding. But what does he understand? He’s not dying; his family’s not dying. (Anymore, the voice whispers.) Vik frowns at the ground.
Before anyone else can speak to me—or grab me—I flee toward the athletic fields.
I fly like a homing pigeon for the nearest basketball court and collapse cross-legged in the center circle.
As I face the woods, its leaves a riot of yellow, orange, and red, I hate the trees for their long lives, and I hate the hoops for reminding me of Dad.
There’s a photo of him on Mom’s nightstand in his blue-on-white college basketball uniform, two years older than I am now, mid-jump shot.
Anytime I asked about that photo, he swore he threw an air ball.
Mom, rolling her eyes, told him not to lie for a laugh: It was the first game of his she ever went to; she remembered the whole night perfectly, and he made the shot.
Tears burn my eyes.
I hear footsteps behind me. I hope against hope they belong to Vik.
“Norah,” Griffin calls.
Of course it’s not Vik. Why would he follow you after everything?
I blink hard. By the time Griffin has circled around to my front, my eyes are dry.
He lowers himself to the asphalt an arm’s length away. “You were never going to win,” he says, not unkindly. “Bree would’ve lost to anyone on my team. That’s not her fault. But for what it’s worth…Vik’s been one of the best navigators at the Academy since he got here. Maybe the best.”
A sense of unreality descends on me. I lost my shot to save my life and Dad’s, and Griffin has decided now’s the time to sing his team’s praises to my face. “Okay?”
Griffin laughs. “Give me one single ounce of credit. I’m not talking to talk. What I mean is, he’s been top of the class forever, and you stalemated him after a few months of formal training.”
“My team lost.”
“The team thing’s bullshit. If the point of the trials is to make the best nav students Archive assistants, we should compete individually. If we had, you’d be coming with me to the Archive. That’s all I wanted to say.”
“Oh.” I can’t summon a better response. Does he expect his approval to matter to me?
He ducks his head, blond hair falling over his eyes, photogenic despite the sweat darkening his roots.
It’s like a film director told him to play a bashful boy.
“Actually, the thing about the competition wasn’t all I wanted to say.
I guess Thanksgiving break technically starts tomorrow, but when we’re back on campus…
could we get dinner? There’s something I wanted to ask you. ”
“Ask me now.” Tomorrow I could be dead.
“Maybe right now’s not the best—”
“Ask me now.”
“Okay, okay, dictatoress. You know Winter Formal?”
“Bree brought it to my attention.”
“Ah. Right. Are you still not planning to go?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
“Uh.” He grins. “That far ahead? It’s in three weeks.”
I shrug.
“Now that I’ve reminded you…would you think about going with me?”
I’m going to die, and one of the people who signed my death warrant—who just manifested in flickerstate as a whirlpool of blood—is asking me to a high school dance. I stare at him blankly.
He peeks at me from beneath his photogenic hair and winces, laughing. “Wow. Fine; I didn’t expect you to say yes anyway.”
He did expect me to. I can tell from the surprised hurt he’s covering up with a smile.
“I haven’t said anything yet,” I hear myself point out.
He raises his head. “No, you haven’t. Great! Don’t say anything. Just…think about it.”
Right now, I can’t think of a gentle way to reject him, and I’ve burned enough people today. “All right.”
A smile, genuine this time, steals over Griffin’s face. “Good. Uh, don’t take too long. I’m sure a dozen ladies will ask me after break, and I’d like to use you as a human shield.”
Any other day, it would irritate me that Griffin is interpreting my response as a delayed yes, not the delayed no it is. Today I feel nothing. I’m too far-off. (Am I in shock?) I try to muster a response that sounds like me. “Never call girls ‘ladies’ in my presence again.”
“I make no promises. Time for a smooth transition to a neutral topic. Um.” He nods to the rack of basketballs courtside. “Want a rematch?”
I’m numb, but if I touch a basketball, I’ll break down. “I’d rather sleep for a week.”
“In the middle of the court?”
“I’ll head back to the dorm.”
“Mind if I walk you?”
“Thanks, but like I said, I want to be alone for a bit. See you.”
I sense his eyes on me as I leave, but I feel no temptation to glance back. Is that shock or plain indifference? Does it matter?
***
When I wake up, the sunset glows orange across my dorm room’s white wall.
I’m sprawled on my unmade bed. My left arm, trapped under my body, has gone numb.
I roll onto my back and massage the dead arm, thinking nothing, letting flashes of reality hit me: saffron light, stuffy air, the blanket twisted under me, the sticky itch between my shoulder blades.
Once my arm buzzes with blood flow, I reach for my phone.
Black screen. Right; I turned it off before the trial.
I press the power button, and a white logo appears in the blackness.
Then my wallpaper: our old family dog Snickerdoodle, a food-obsessed mutt who bit our toes to demand treats and got away with it because she was so cute. I loved that evil animal.
I look at her photo and I don’t feel anything.
The image rattles and shakes like The Exorcist girl as notifications possess my phone: texts from Candace and Vik—and four voicemails from Jo.
My numbness vanishes. My hands start trembling.
It takes me three tries before I successfully swipe on Jo’s last message to return her call.
The phone rings and rings. Did she see my name pop up on her screen and decide to make me wait because I sent her to voicemail earlier?
I hope so. If Jo’s being passive-aggressive, nothing’s gone sickeningly wrong with Dad. God please, God please—
The ringing chokes off. “Where have you been?” Jo spits.
“In class,” I say. “Where else. What—”
“It’s Dad.”
No, no, no, no. “What happened? Jo?”
“This morning, I walked into his room to ask whether he wanted coffee. Mom was changing the bandages on his bites. She yelled at me to get out, but I’d already seen—the wounds are worse. Deeper.”
I press the phone against my ear. “How deep?”
“I don’t know, deep.” She’s crying. “Mom said you weren’t even coming home for Thanksgiving. When are you getting the cure and getting back here?”
I stare at the orange light darkening across my wall.
At some point during the last few weeks’ sleepless fugue, I texted Mom not to waste money on Thanksgiving plane tickets for me.
Dr. Langmore had mentioned in clinic that the trial winners wouldn’t get Archive access till after break, and I didn’t want to come home till I could do it victorious, with the great Highwall’s secret cure in my hands.
I wanted to be my family’s savior.
That isn’t going to happen now. I lost, I’m dying, I give up.
You give up?
Jo sobs. “Say something.”
I can give up on myself if I want, but this horror show isn’t all about me.
It isn’t even all about Dad. It’s about Jo, Kev, Irene, Mom.
They’re the ones who’ll have to live with my failure.
My plan to save my family relied on my personal excellence at following rules and winning contests. I botched that plan.
That doesn’t mean I get to stop trying.
It means I need a new plan.
“I messed up,” I admit. “My team lost the Archive trials.”
Jo inhales sharply. After a long pause, she asks, “How else can you get the cure?”
“I’ll need help,” I say.